| 1920s Social Critics |
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PROHIBITION During the 1920s the populations in cities swelled. This caused crime, corruption, and immoral behavior to become more rampant. Women would go into bars, alcohol was consumed, and sex was talked about openly. People were constantly breaking laws and enforcers would have to arrest more and more people each day. Finally, congress had had enough of this and narrowed the violence down to a large source; Alcohol. Alcohol was the cause of constant carousing in the bars and in the home. Finally, congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment , banning the manufacturing, sale, drinking, and transportation of this now illegal substance. This did not stop the drinking in America and did quite the opposite. It made people drink more. Not only that, but the bootlegger was born. Bootleggers were men who sold alcohol called “Moonshine” (illegal alcohol). “Moonshine,” was usually clear alcohol made with bad materials like chemicals and poisons. To transport this cargo, they would have to drive at high speeds down roads at night to avoid the cops. To go faster than the cops, they would tweak their cars. (An interesting fact was that these bootleggers would later become the first stock car racers of NASCAR.) Congress tried to keep up with these criminals by passing the Volstead act. This act allowed the pursuit of all bootleggers and the destruction of all alcohol. Prohibition would not end until fourteen years later. AUTHORS Authors were starting to became more abundant and the quality of writing started to sky rocket. Francis Scott Fitzgerald , Ernest Hemingway , and Gertrude Stein were a few authors popular at the time. Fitzgerald’s second novel, “ The Beautiful And Damned ,” published in 1922, represents an impressive development over the comparatively immature, “ This Side Of Paradise .” “ The Great Gatsby ,” which many consider his masterpiece, was published in 1925. Fitzgerald made several excursions to Europe, notably Paris and the French Riviera, and became friends with many members of the American expatriate community in Paris, such as Ernest Hemingway. SCOPES TRIAL The Scopes Trial of 1925, involved lawyers William Jennings Bryan vs Clarence Darrow (the latter representing teacher John T. Scopes) This was an American court case that tested a law passed on March 13 1925 . This law forbade the teaching, in any state-funded educational establishment in Tennessee, of "any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals". This is often interpreted as meaning that the law disallowed the teaching of any aspect of the theory of evolution. It has often been called the "Scopes Monkey Trial". COMMUNISM Communism in the 1920s was just starting to be regarded as the worst possible thing that could happen to any living person. Some how the idea of having everyone be the same in economic standards didn’t bode well with the risk-taking attitude of the American in the 1920s. In fact, if anyone publicly said they believed in communism, they would be fired from their job. Most Americans regarded communism as representing atheism. EXTERNAL LINKS |
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